Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Clustered together in hulking buildings alongside the dry docks and ruins of the Brooklyn Navy Yard are dozens of artists. This past weekend, they opened their studios to the public. Brooklyn Navy Yard Arts has the full line-up and more information on the event.

The Navy Yard artists are a different crowd than the ones I encountered at the Bushwick Open Studios--it's an older bunch, with kids. And grandkids. I wondered about the demographic shift: if the Navy Yard studios are more expensive than those in Bushwick, or if the artists have been here longer, or manage to be more successful.

The visitors were older, too--mostly middle-aged and up. The studios were clean and uncluttered. The art generally didn't do anything too loopy or overstimulating. It was very, well, adult--things you might want to hang on your wall--like Michael Sherman's lovely, monochromatic watercolors of urban scenes.

An artist whose work I found particularly interesting is Thomas Witte. He takes his grandparents' old photographs, stencils them into painstaking paper cut-outs, then transfers them onto glass with layers of spray paint.

painting and stencil by Thomas Witte

His collection features parking lots full of 1970s cars, and old people in drab clothing and chunky eyeglasses. He also paints Brooklyn storefronts, which you can see here.